Who Named the Knife

by Linda Spalding

  Finally and in conclusion, Maryann’s representative, Deborah Fraser, makes a speech. She’d read the article “Where Is William Acker?” in California Legal Magazine and told Maryann’s family that it might be the means to get her paroled. Now she says, “The district attorney has looked at this case for twenty-four hours. I’ve been with it for two years since I was first appointed. I’ve had an opportunity to take a close look at the crime partner, William Acker. I can understand where all of us sort of think that Maryann doesn’t articulate real well and it’s what to us appears to show a lack of remorse but is actually sort of an aspect of her personality which is not like mine. She is not Italian and she doesn’t have that sort of effervescence. But that’s Maryann. William Acker is a notorious squeal. He has testified in over thirteen capital cases and he’s responsible for sending a man to death row. What’s more, during Maryann’s trial in California, her attorney was an ex-district attorney and Maryann was his first and last client. At the end of the trial he went back to the DA’s office. He didn’t even show up for her sentencing. He waived jury in a murder case. That’s absurd! And at the time that this trial was going on, the judge was under investigation for making obscene phone calls.… This case is real strange. And it’s just on and on as weird as it can be. William Acker had told L.A. Detective Ahn about the Hawaii case and said he was doing it so his wife could get psychiatric help. Well, everybody sort of knows when they deal with William Acker that the one person who needs serious psychiatric help is William Acker. He’s been in and out of jail since he was six years old. Maryann didn’t know that at eighteen. I think we all agree, except perhaps for the district attorney, that Maryann didn’t kill anybody. She never murdered a soul and yet she’s sitting here for two counts of murder. Now she’s got to be responsible for those robberies and at eighteen years old sometimes you don’t know your head from a hole in the ground and you don’t see a way out. Acker is very good at what he does. I had two cases I dug up where he accused his ex-wife in parcel with another robbery. They dismissed against her. He got a hundred and twenty days. And then six months later he got out, after six months he had another girlfriend try to steal a car in a parking lot in Zody. He tells the cops she did it. She wasn’t even near the car. And he ends up doing time and she ends up getting probation. So this guy has got a whole story behind him of accusing other people of doing crimes in which the crime partners have little or nothing to do with it. And this case is no different. What he’s done is he’s accused his wife of committing two murders and it is on his testimony in Hawaii. How he cut this deal, I don’t know. But she ends up going down with a 187 in Hawaii and he walks away with a robbery. He did enough tactical manoeuvres in 1979 at that California trial to avoid ever having to stand trial with Maryann. If he had had to stand trial with her, I don’t think she would be here. I think that when the DA talks about no remorse … you couldn’t describe William Acker better. The man will do anything and sell anybody to save his own soul. In 1991 you were the commissioner on his case when he testified at his own parole hearing. What’s he say? Maryann didn’t kill anybody. And he finally …”

  O’CONNELL: Yes. I asked him the question specifically and I don’t think I was as vehement toward him. I didn’t tell him that he was the scum of the earth at that time, but he really is.

  MS. FRASER: He really is. Is Maryann suitable for parole? You bet she is. She didn’t murder anybody. She’s spent fourteen years in this prison doing time and it hasn’t been wasted. She’s raised herself up from being a stupid kid at eighteen to being at least a decent smart kid at thirty-two. And I think it’s time to let her go. She should be paroled. And William Acker ought to burn in hell for putting her here. She does take responsibility for her crimes, but what does she get? She didn’t murder anybody and that’s what she’s doing time for. So if you want to talk about a reasonable risk, if you had to make a pitch to the governor, this is the one. This is the one. Maryann Acker is suitable and she should be out.

  Soon after the hearing, Deborah Fraser disappeared. Maryann could not find her. When USC accepted Maryann’s case in 1995, they could not find her. They needed the files and transcripts from previous hearings. Where was Deborah Fraser?

  Dear Linda,

  You want to know something that I am really looking forward to doing when I get out? I want to go grocery shopping. I want to get in a car and go to a store and buy some food and then cook it. And then something else. Going into a bathroom, shutting the door behind me, and taking a shower by myself and barefooted! The shower room, which is at the top of the hall, has three shower stalls and a bathtub. The partitions don’t go all the way to the floor, so you get your feet splashed by the water from the other showers. Unless, on a rare occasion there’s no one else in there, you can’t just get a quiet, peaceful, relaxing shower. And, with 120 people sharing 8 showers (there is a shower room in each hallway), you don’t dare go without thongs (shower shoes). And unless you thoroughly scour it before hand, you don’t dare take a bath.

  I just finished reading The House of Mirth and it struck me how the woman, Lily Bart, made a ‘career’ out of climbing the social ladder and attempting to find an appropriate husband, all of which led to her demise. Women have come so far in some ways.

  Love ya,

  Maryann

  32

  In August 2001, Maryann wrote to tell me that she was making piñatas for the prison’s Mexican American Association. The piñatas would be sent to schools and hospitals. There was a banquet planned for September 11. Maryann wrote, “Something fun to look forward to.”

  Then, when the Trade Center was hit, there was an immediate call. I had thought of her locked away monastically – as separate from news of the outside world as she was from its pleasures. But she listens to the radio at five o’clock every morning and she knew about the attacks before I did. A few minutes after her phone call, the prison yard was closed and the women spent the rest of that day locked down, as if the falling towers had made them suddenly dangerous. While they were on lockdown, more than six thousand dollars was collected among them. “In here it had a unifying effect.” Maryann told me, adding that it’s their country too. “Our families are out there, remember, and our neighbours, and everything we care about.”

  It made me want to see my mother.

  By late September, airport security had changed – everything had changed – and entering my birth country was a foreign experience. I had become an alien. It takes about seven hours, all told, to get from my front door in Toronto to my mother’s Topeka house. I’d fly down, rent a car in Kansas City, and drive for an hour and a half. I’d ring the doorbell. Then, following the greeting, there was supposed to be the sniffing of rooms, the essential iced tea, although all of that had ended a few weeks before when suddenly, like the country around her, my mother had ceased to be recognizable.

  At the high-school reunion, I’d learned that several of my old classmates were having similar problems with their parents. I hadn’t seen these people for forty years, but they had taken my troubles to heart. I was given business cards, hugs, followup visits in the front yard and the name of that place where the mother with Alzheimer’s lived. “It’s just what you need,” the junior-high crush had assured me. He of the white moustache. I had told him I’d suffered agonies in my great desire for him. We had danced. He was one of the boys with whom I had learned what must have been our unique, local step. He had kindly said, “I wish I’d known.”

  The other old flame – the one who ran off to the Pacific – offered his legal services. He was the first boy I kissed after my life-changing journey to Hawaii in 1958. I kissed him in the front yard, under the empty flagpole, when I realized that my new attractiveness was flavoured by my desire for escape. Yes, coming back from so far away had given me a little mystery and I clung to it.

  The place my reunion dance partner mentioned was nice. I had gone to look at it. There was a second-floor apartment available with balcony doors that looked
straight into the branches of an oak, my mother’s favourite tree. But how would I ever talk her into it? According to the county social worker, my mother couldn’t or didn’t feed herself, wash herself, remember dates, or show any interest in life. But she was legally in charge of herself. To go in another direction, to make myself her guardian, would be an indignity I couldn’t bear to press on her.

  Now, in her dark bedroom, a bundle of blankets was unresponsive. “Linda’s here,” said Sandee, who was employed by the county to be there every afternoon. The smell of uneaten chicken soup filtered in from the kitchen.

  Mother rolled over and smiled, then rolled into her fetal position again.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” I said nervously.

  Mother said, “Not today. I don’t feel well enough.”

  I cursed my brother for his plane crash. I wrung my hands and bit my lips and went in the living room and paced. Then I told Mother to get in my rented car or I would call an ambulance.

  She locked herself in the bathroom, but came out twenty minutes later lipsticked and powdered and rouged. “My clothes …”

  “You’ll go in your robe.” Sandee and I led Mother outside, all the way to the curb where I had parked my car. She seemed to be treading very carefully, as if there were hundreds of eggs on the grass. Or land mines. From the height of the curb the passenger seat seemed to be miles away. We lowered her into it.

  I didn’t think that she was never coming back. I didn’t think that she would be assigned to the locked mental ward of the hospital. I thought I was doing my best and maybe I was. In her room in the mental ward there was a mirror, a dressing table, a closet, a private toilet and washbasin. I kept thinking of prison, but Mother thought she was in a hotel.

  Maryann called but what news could she have that was equal to this? “If it would help at all to talk,” she said. She said how much she regretted not being there with her parents when they were sick, when they needed her.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “But I live in another country.” I was thinking of the months Mother had spent with me in Hawaii – a middle-aged widow and a young divorcee trying to be a family for two little girls. I wanted to tell Maryann how much I was missing my mother, but how could I explain the force she had been in my life?

  “I wish you would describe her,” Maryann said.

  “Her pride and joy is her cat, Miss Pym,” I said, “but when I’m at the hospital, she never mentions her.”

  So Maryann told me about Nermal. She had been working for Inmate Day Labor, the prison construction crew where she was a clerk, keeping records of materials and orders for her boss, while the other women prisoners did electrical or plumbing or building work. This has been her favourite job, but it’s not dependable because state projects often run out of money. The central unit needs a new roof, but that will have to wait. A housing unit needs to be rewired, but there is nothing in the budget for it. Still, prisoners have to work. They need money for tampons and shampoo and soap. They need money for food from the canteen and for pyjamas and underwear. Stamps. Stationery. Besides, it’s the law. Each of them has a five-day workweek, with the average pay being thirty-five cents an hour, although they never see any money; they have accounts that they draw against, the way coal miners used to draw against supplies at the company store.

  It was while working for Inmate Day Labor that Maryann met the little cat named Nermal – “because he’s not quite normal” – one of the many feral cats who lived on the prison grounds. Nermal had started watching Maryann during work hours, when the rest of the crew was outside. “I’d feed her lunch meat out of my box lunch because generally I won’t touch the stuff anyway.” Naturally the little cat followed Maryann to the next job site. Every morning she’d wait for her generous human friend at the gate they had to go through to get to work. When IDL completed the project and relocated, someone told Maryann that the cat was still waiting at the gate.

  One day Maryann was sent back to that site to pick up some tools. She called and the little cat came running. Maryann took her to the new site, and she and Valere started showing her the way to their housing unit until Nermal took up residence on the meagre windowsill of their cell. She said, “Now, about Miss Pym,” and I tried to imagine her face, although I had no idea where she was sitting or standing. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like where she lived. “Once I dreamed that I was getting ready to parole,” she said. “I was trying to put Nermal into a box to take him with me, but before I could get the lid on the box, he jumped out and wouldn’t come back. Linda, I was devastated.”

  I was following the story. It was a little diversion, nothing more, and our minutes were ticking away. Then she said that when the prison decided to cull the cats, she got frightened. There had always been rules. No pets for prisoners. No taming. No feeding. But now the ones they could find were going to be killed and for the first time in days, I focused on something besides my mother or myself. When she said she had wangled permission to get Nermal out, I listened. She had arranged for permission to give her cat to Sheron, the faithful visitor. It was a sacrifice. To guarantee his safety. She took a long breath.

  33

  At the hospital, a woman named Velma invited me to sit down at the bingo table where she and my mother were sitting. My mother, never a player of games, sat there listlessly while Velma was bouncy, imparting real urgency to the game. She took an interest in Mother, tracing her background and mentioning a friend they had in common. “Why Jill Seegram! She’s from my town.”

  At the mention of Jill Seegram, Mother’s face brightened a shade.

  “Why I remember their place,” Velma insisted. “That apartment over the store. They had some real good antiques.”

  “Jill always looked so refined,” I added next. “With that ash-blond chignon. And her tweeds.” There had been rumours about Jill and my father.

  “Exactly!” Velma exclaimed. “But she’s dead now,” she added respectfully, gazing at Mother. “You sure couldn’t be her age.”

  Both of these assertions threw Mother back into confusion. These days she is frank about her age, although it took ninety years to make her so. Finally, she realized she could use it as an excuse. “I’m an old lady, for heaven’s sake. It’s fine if I want to stay in bed.” When Mother told Velma her age, Velma said, “I don’t believe it! Isn’t she something?”

  I remembered being driven down to the Seegrams’ apartment on a Sunday afternoon, since that was the only day of the week my father spent any time with us. The apartment was huge, full of furniture that looked impressive in the dusty light. But something was wrong in that place. An old man and a beautiful wife. “You went to England with Jill after Dad died,” I reminded my mother.

  Now she looked at me. Really looked. “Yes, I did,” she agreed. “She smoked all the time. Yes, that’s right.”

  There were only certain hours I was allowed to visit my mother, so I spent the rest of my time going through her house, as if my attention to her basement, her desk, her closets would bring her back to herself. I made piles. To throw away, to give away, to clean. Big bigger biggest. The closets were a heap of various vintages, thousands of shoes, mouse droppings, dead mice. At 2:20 I’d dash to the car and drive to the hospital, where I’d find Mother with Velma, although Velma’s husband was often sitting nearby. All the ladies in the mental ward eyed him hungrily. “I’d like one of those,” my mother whispered to me. Later it was simply, “I want him.”

  I told Mother that Miss Pym had been hiding in the closet and she looked at me blankly. “I don’t know what kind of hotel this is,” she whispered. “Last night a big black girl just came right into my room.” This with a snort of disbelief.

  “It’s a hospital,” I would say, during conversations like this.

  “Why would I be in a hospital? There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Remember how tired you’ve been? You’ve been flat in bed for six weeks.”

  “That’s a lie.”


  In our family there was a current of popular language that never saw the light of day. Mother would say, “Linda Jane, don’t fib.” Her strongest word of censure was “That’s vulgar,” the lowest jibe. So this was a new departure, a new uncensored mother. “Anyway, I’m going home tomorrow. They’re not doing anything for me here.”

  “But I saw your schedule on the board. You had Exercise this morning and a group meeting. You worked with leather.”

  “I hated that. Imagine, with all the things I’ve done in my life, and I couldn’t lace that silly shoe.”

  Velma had been standing in the doorway. Now she entered the room and patted Mother’s knee. “Leather’s hard,” she acknowledged. “It’s a whole different skill from other things.”

  Mother was right about the things she’d done in her life. In the closet, I found Miller shoes, delicious fruited hats, and beautiful sweaters, many of them knit, purled, lined, and decorated by my mother. I could remember occasions for each of her outfits – skirt, blouse, jumper, coat – all made by a dressmaker to be arranged and rearranged. As a girl, evaluating the many possibilities as with paper dolls, I was entranced. No store-bought clothes came near the imaginative variations or style of my mother’s wardrobe. A pair of alligator pumps on platform soles. A matching purse. These were treasures that could not be traded, sold, given, or trashed. But I went on filling clear plastic bags because over the past several years, whether because of failing eyesight, failing nerves, or despair, Mother’s excellent housekeeping skills had disappeared. The evidence of neglect was there in the closet, where several small creatures had died, no doubt miserably, and where I found small bones and cobwebs and unsorted papers and every cancelled cheque ever signed by my father going back to the 1930s. Once I had filled the plastic bags, I washed the shelves and began to reconstruct the closet as it might have been. My favourite dresses were rehung. Several pairs of shoes in their original boxes were put back on the upper shelf. Bags were arranged, even ornaments. It was a memorial to my mother made of her own artifacts.